According to Andy Cordial, managing director of Origin Storage, the storage systems integration specialist, the Applied Research-West study shows that 25% of saved USB stick data covered customer records, 17% financial information and 15% company business plans.
It's against this backdrop, he says, that you begin to realise the real risk that companies are running with unencrypted mobile data.
Cordial argues that, whilst full disk encryption on laptops is an option that many organisations are exploring, this can be overkill for most situations, especially where the employee is using the portable device to take work home or out into the field.
A far more effective solution, he says, is to store the confidential information on a portable encrypted drive in the office environment, and then, when the need to take the data away from the office, the portable unit is easily transportable.
And, the Origin Storage managing director went on to say, as last week's Barnet Council data loss incident – in which the data records of 9000 school children have been stolen in an unencrypted format – clearly shows, there is a definite need for encrypted portable storage in most organisations.